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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24750277">And a Rose Your Mouth</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lucita_de_Aragon/pseuds/Lucita_de_Aragon'>Lucita_de_Aragon</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Jonathan Strange &amp; Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Aphrodisiacs, Drug Use, Fairy Tale Elements, M/M, Mild Surrealism</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 11:15:07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Rape/Non-Con</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,903</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24750277</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lucita_de_Aragon/pseuds/Lucita_de_Aragon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Another evening, another procession, another unwanted gift.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Stephen Black/The Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Nonconathon 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>And a Rose Your Mouth</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nelja/gifts">Nelja-in-English (Nelja)</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The rose in Stephen’s mouth was choking him. He had felt its petals fall from his lips before, particularly when speaking of his captivity, much like the maiden in Monsieur Perrault’s tale. That the maiden had gained that dubious gift from her appeal to a fairy was not lost on Stephen. A stab of what might have been anger, or perhaps sadness or self-pity, flared in his heart at the thought.</p><p>With a great effort of will he drew a breath until the rose petals parted, only to lose his breath once more as the gentleman’s lips covered Stephen’s own to smother the slightest bit of further sound. Surely the kiss had begun chaste—the gentleman had often expressed his affection for Stephen so. Stephen supposed he ought to feel surprize at his body’s response, but truly it felt the most natural thing in the world to part his lips for a gasp of breath as the gentleman’s hands came to rest in the small of his back. One hand traced the line of Stephen’s spine to come to rest beneath his cravat on the bare skin of his neck.</p><p>Stephen shuddered with a thrill of drunken, vertiginous desire. How had this situation occurred? He remembered one of the endless processions, a cup of something like bitter honey, the warmth of the usually chill air of Lost-hope. Thence, the gentleman had drawn him to a bedchamber draped in velvets and linens of a colour the gentleman had lightly assured him were the hues of thwarted and violent passion. He recalled, too, his veins singing and burning until he felt the rose bloom in his mouth and the branches of the bleak wood about the grounds of Lost-hope stretch over and around them as he melted avidly into the gentleman’s embrace. The remaining splinter of his conscious mind cried out in confusion and horror, but the brambles around him made such thoughts difficult and muddled. Far better, far simpler to submit to the base passions that overflowed his breast in sudden and greater profusion than he might have imagined.</p><p>“My most beautiful Stephen.” The gentleman’s voice was husky, his words mingling with the perpetual music of Lost-hope, the wind-howl and branch-scrape of the wood.</p><p>“Do you...” Stephen murmured. The situation seemed wrong, but it was more and more difficult to think of anything save for the velvet-hot press of the gentleman’s lips. The air was an attar of roses unknown to any man of the Christian world, at once fresh and heavy with the dark-musty scent of everything in Lost-hope. Stephen felt quite light-headed, unable to gather his thoughts. All that seemed to matter was the gentleman’s body, slighter than his own and lithe as the human youth he resembled at times, skin flushed with the opalescence with which it softly glowed when the gentleman was excited in any manner.</p><p>“Hush.” A pale finger brushed his lips, lingering on the full lower one before trailing beneath Stephen’s chin to undo his cravat. The gentleman’s hands seemed to leave pale trails in the air, like will-o’-the-wisp or the impression of a bright light observed too long. Stephen closed his eyes, dizzy with desire and confusion. His breast heaved, and he could do nothing but clutch the gentleman closer, tongue battling blood and petals and thorns to enter the gentleman’s own mouth, to brush his eager, clever tongue as Stephen’s own hands dropped, half against his own will, to the buttons of the gentleman’s waistcoat.</p><p>“My dear Stephen, whatever are you doing?” asked the gentleman, a bemused look crossing his pointed features. “To perform the office pressed upon you by your enemy at this time, even for the most solicitous of reasons, is quite beneath you!” A shimmer like starlight and the gentleman was quite unclad, his skin scintillant against the deep brown velvet of Stephen’s. His narrow shoulders, breast, and thighs were sculpted like those of a Greek statue, the instrument standing straight as a poker at the juncture of his legs of dimensions that made Stephen’s face heat to think of the uses it might be put to.</p><p>The gentleman, meanwhile, had busied himself with Stephen’s own clothing, his proscription against such menial tasks quite forgotten. Perhaps, from the intent expression on his face, he found excitement in performing what was to him surely such an unusual action. Further shame flooded Stephen’s already heated nerves as the removal of his coat, waistcoat, shirt, and trousers revealed himself to be in as great a state of excitement as the gentleman’s. The gentleman drew close to draw a hand down the length of Stephen’s chest to curl about the thick, upward-curved shaft of Stephen’s own instrument, and Stephen cried out despite himself, crushing their lips together once more in a blaze of heat and prickling pain. The revulsion in the back of his mind was a grey thread that slipped from him even as he attempted to cling to it. His hands tangled in the soft down of the gentleman’s hair, pulling him in for another kiss that plucked at the thread even as desire overwhelmed disgust like a gale against a feather.</p><p>Then, suddenly, the gentleman was kneeling before him upon the flags of the bedchamber, the cold hardness of the stone hardly seeming to concern him as he took Stephen’s prick into his mouth. The peculiar heat of his mouth was like an electric spark, enveloping Stephen in rushing, encroaching sensation as surely as the gentleman’s skillful mouth enveloped the whole of his instrument. Once more, Stephen cried out, petals spilling from his mouth over his chest like a fall of bloody snow to settle in the gentleman’s hair and over the floor. He was undone, he knew, the throbs of pleasure that wracked him binding him inexorably into this wicked enchantment. The torment was sweeter than any pleasure, sweeter than anything from the ordinary world which seemed now so distant and strange. This world circled tighter and tighter into woods and thorns and darkness until, finally, he felt the climax of desire tear through him with a force he had never felt in any of the self-abuse he had indulged in throughout his youth, as he spent himself again and again between those thin, avid lips.</p><p>Gasping, trembling, as though struck by invisible lightning, he felt himself helped onto the great bed at one end of the chamber, repulsed and aroused in equal measure by the touch of the one that bore him up. “I am glad to see that my skill as a lover is recognized and appreciated, even by one so discerning as yourself,” the gentleman seemed to be saying, white-silver impressions of the words floating about him like distant stars.</p><p>“I...” Stephen regarded the gentleman as steadily as he might. The words he wished to say, begging the gentleman to leave him to his own hands and his own desire and not to violate him any further, would not come, tangled in the bitter, rose-tasting silk that choked his mouth. He longed for such degradation, for the gentleman to lay him bare with hand and mouth and prick until nothing of Stephen remained. “Do you mean… to be here long?” he asked, his voice vacant and faint in his own ears.</p><p>“Long?” the gentleman laughed, stroking a hand along Stephen’s thigh. “Why, with the draught from the festivities we have only just begun!”</p><p>Stephen groaned, delight and horror mingling in his throat like the taste of the earlier draught as the gentleman draped himself over Stephen’s trembling legs to twine themselves together. Rather than having abated in the slightest with his climax in the gentleman's mouth, the torment of his own excitement seemed unquenched—perhaps heightened, the spark of powder before the discharge of a bullet. Though he was not entirely erect, his body cried for touch down to the very bone, a hunger that it seemed no amount of eager, open-mouthed kisses, no clawing caress of the gentleman's shoulders over his sculpted back which arched with pleasure under Stephen's touch, could sate beyond a handful of sweat-drenched moments.</p><p>Another gasp tore from Stephen’s lips as the Gentleman positioned himself between Stephen's legs, the base of his star-white shaft in one hand as the finger of his other hand brushed a place between Stephen's legs so intimate that Stephen felt his skin, somehow, grow yet more heated with shame and ardor. Through the discomfort and disorientation that filled the gaps around the roses like a fever he nonetheless felt himself cock his hips upward, legs twined about the gentleman's hips as the broad, blunt head of the gentleman's shaft breached the innermost part of him. The gentleman seemed beyond language himself as he pressed his tongue wetly into Stephen’s mouth, drawing Stephen up to sit astride his lap as his other hand stroked the smooth-shorn curve of Stephen's head to the base of his neck.</p><p>Filled to bursting with the gentleman's prick, his gasps in the wood-silent chamber surely as shameless as any harlot's, Stephen rocked his hips forward even as the near-painful stretch brought tears to his eyes. This provoked a hiss from the gentleman quite unlike any sound Stephen had heard from the lips of man or woman. Teeth bared in the manner of a hound after a quarry, he thrust savagely upward, causing Stephen to cry out in a wordless ecstasy of pain and pleasure. His closely-buffed nails raked twin trails down Stephen's back with enough force to surely draw blood, his teeth catching Stephen's lower lip between them hard enough for Stephen to loudly cry once more. Despite the pain, he could not pull away as brambles and roses alike tangled about them, twining them together like Barbary Allan and her lover united in death. He was unsure when he had once again become as hard as the stones of this chamber which would surely be his tomb, but every thrust of himself or the gentleman served only to inflame him further until he was rutting shamelessly against the gentleman's stomach, fast and hard and eager and hot until the gentleman cried out something surely in his own tongue and sheathed his weapon to the hilt inside Stephen with the desperate finality of completion. The hot spurt of the gentleman's seed, the bite of his teeth into Stephen's neck was too much and he felt himself spend once more in a torment of ecstasy that claimed his mind for a handful of dark, merciful moments of oblivion amid the roses and thorns.</p><p>***</p><p>An unaccountable time later, Stephen awoke in his own bed, as ever tired as though he had not slept a moment. He avoided his own eyes in the mirror of his dressing-table as he made his toilet as if it were any ordinary morning. The weals he felt along his back might have been nothing if he sat at precise angles. The dark circles about the base of his neck could surely be put to tricks of the light. A weak and idle theme no more yielding than a dream, like the memory of the gentleman’s hands upon his skin. Stephen shook his head violently to drive the thought of those hands from his mind, resisting the urge to dash his shaving-mirror against the wall.</p><p>Face and head shaved, freshly-laundered coat brushed and impeccable, Stephen Black stepped into another bleak eternity of a day.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thanks very much to my beta and Brit-picker Aansero. Title is from Tennyson's <i>Maud,</i> the "rosy is the North" part of which always makes me think of poor Stephen and Lady Pole. Nelja, thank you for finally getting me to pluck up the courage to write this pairing I've wished to write for some years now. I really hope you've enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing it.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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